[[http://www.livejournal.com LiveJournal]] is an online journal hosting site. LJ's English-language content tends to be more diary-like than other blogging sites, and as such it has a reputation for being frequented by whiny teenagers. Its format is user-friendly and highly customizable, offering multiple user pics, mood settings, and journal layouts.

The site is also greatly used by fanfiction writers, possibly due to the comments section, which makes each entry something like a miniature forum. As such, LJ is home to many communities, which discuss everything from knitting to politics. Mainly, though, it's fanfiction. A lot of fanfiction. [=LiveJournal=] seems to specialize in writing communities, of which it has hundreds, most of them fanfiction. [[LivejournalRoleplay Roleplaying]] communities were also popular (most have since moved to a spinoff, Website/{{Dreamwidth}}), all of them basically fanfiction.

LJ's popularity has dwindled through the early 2010's, with the advent of first Website/MySpace, then Website/{{Facebook}}, and then Website/{{Tumblr}}, which attracted a lot of the slash fangirls who previously used [=LiveJournal=]. It also garnered a reputation for [[{{bowdlerize}} banning journals because of "objectionable content"]] (particularly [[ThePurge Strikethrough '07]]) which violates the Terms of Service; this is called TOS'ing. [=LiveJournal=] has TOS'd some of its most popular journals, like Fandom_Wank and scans_daily. They're real [[{{Pun}} TOSsers]]. Major changes to the site interface in December '11 drove many fandom users, particularly roleplayers, off the site as well.

LJ's journal system is open source, so a lot of clones have sprung up over the years, and (in some cases) subsequently perished; survivors include [[http://www.insanejournal.com/ InsaneJournal]], [[http://www.deadjournal.com/ DeadJournal]], [[http://www.journalfen.net/ JournalFen]] and [[http://www.dreamwidth.org/ Dreamwidth]]. Since its founding, [=JournalFen=] has been a haven for [[http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/ Fandom_Wank]], which exists largely to point out [=LiveJournal=] drama. Scans_daily has [[http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/ moved to InsaneJournal]] and [[http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/profile has also moved to Dreamwidth]].

LJ is also, for unclear reasons, [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff the most popular host]] for [[RussianLanguage Russian-language]] bloggers, to the point where the [[UsefulNotes/{{Russia}} Russian]] term for blogging is [[BrandNameTakeover derived from the Russian name]] of [=LiveJournal=]. A Russian company now owns the site, a number of high-profile Russian politicians maintain [=LJs=], Russian authors used LJ to publish excerpts or teasers for their new books, and it's even been theorized that the [=DDoS=] attacks on the site in April 2011 were caused by the Russian government in order to silence a critical blogger. The Russian content on LJ is a lot more like the rest of the English language blogosphere, and rarely interacts with the English-speaking side of LJ (aside from the occasional Russian spam comment on an English-language journal.)

See also: JournalRoleplay -- This particular style of roleplay started on [=LiveJournal=].----